Weirdest thefts?

[Dragon_Dreamer]

Found some compact glasses today on the floor. Someone had stolen the pleather cases they came with, and left the glasses.

I've seen all kinds of weird things stolen, like Visene, various KY products, and the like.

Weirdest I've heard of yet was the person who stole a bunch of 90% off Christmas clearence items a couple years ago... they'd only been worth 99 cents at FULL price. 9 cent items, why bother?

So, while the most expensive thread is long dead, what was your weirdest or most memorable theft? Not just foiled attempts, but even among those shoplifters that weren't caught.

[AirHostess]

People who steal safety cards and airplane soap.

[squall]

Had people steal Bibles of all things. Had one guy steal a cell phone out of one of the tough plastic cases. He cut himself on the case and lost some blood.

When Pokemon was a big thing, we had kids stealing the cards every day. We knew who they were. When they saw us coming, they took several packs and went to different aisles with them, leaving the empty packages. Our security team at the store had their hands tied by our shitty corporate policy and they were afraid to even accuse them or throw them out, and they didn't think the kids were worth the hassle. They were brave, they knew we weren't going to do anything other than try to intimidate them into leaving. I threw them out once on sight myself, something management frowns upon, but I was sick and fed up with them being cowards. One security person finally scared them shitless somehow and they never came back.

Also had an incident where a guy was being followed by security. He knew he was being followed. He took the merchandise into the bathroom and put them in the urinals and toilets. He then pissed and shat all over them, even leaving one on the floor and pissing on it. He left the restroom with no merchandise and was let go by security. They then found the nice surprise in the restroom. Nobody touched the stuff for hours.

When I was a teenager in teen court, there was one kid in there for stealing some food.....frozen chicken nuggets....tore them out of the box and put them in his pocket.

People steal condoms and KY jelly all the time. Alot of them are embarrassed at what the cashier will think, many of the people who stole them were probably teenagers too. I've seen stores that locked those items up. I can only imagine the embarrassment and sales decreases they get.

[ArenaBoy]

I have 2 thefts that stick in my head. The 1st one involved the theft of traffic cones happening at the Party venue. We managed to put an end to it when one of us screamed at the idiots doing this. The 2nd also happnened at the Party venue.
When I worked a country show, a guy and his buddies pull in with a D's Pizza Delivery Sign on his car, he looked like he just got off work, his car was 95 convertible, this is important. During egress, that same 95 convertible was leaving with the D's Pizza sign on it, I thought nothing of it. Until the orginal owner comes to me and asks me about the sign, I realize that the theif and owner both had the same car and tell him that the idiots are near some trees. That guy took off like a bat out of hell and was VERY close to punching the idiots who stole his sign.

[Mongo Skruddgemire]

Strangest thing I've ever had stolen was our computer cases. We had someone break into our store and stole the display computer cases. They were the fancy cases with the light-up color bars and the blacklight kits inside so we hooked them up so people could see what their computer would look in these tricked-out cases.

Next morning we called the police and we found out that they didn't leave any fingerprints and were unlikely to be caught because of that. We called the window repair place and had the window replaced that day (lucky they had a pane in our size as a leftover from another job in our plaza). We also bought a bunch of security cameras and the central recording unit at Sam's Club and installed it.

That night we got the cases back...through the window and smashing the display case of our video cards, motherboards and other nifty computer stuff. They jumped in, grabbed a few items and scattered before the cops showed up.

These jerkwads wore gloves, but nothing to hide their faces. They were recognized by the cops, arrested, our stuff returned (after being used as evidence) and they went to jail.

Reason they came back? They were pissed that the computers they stole had nothing in them.

M

[Linda]

This is slightly OT, but related. My car got broken into last week. They completely trashed it, so much so I had to buy a new one. But I digress.

Anyhoos, when we got home the night before, we were feeling tired and lazy, so we left some things in the car which under normal circumstances would be tempting to would be thieves. When we checked over the car with the police to make a list of what had been stolen, the MP3 player, spare change, chequebook and radio were all intact. They had taken...

...half a tin of shoe polish. In cherry red (for my DMs).

[South Texan]

One Christmas eve, someone broke into our church through a back window and headed for the office where, logically, most of the valuable items in the church building and the Christmas eve offering would be kept locked up. When the guy smashed through the hollow office door in the hallway, he saw the big, heavy, solid double deadbolted door right beside the secretary’s desk. It must have taken a few hours for him to pick and dismantle the locks and finally get that door open. It had to have been quite a task. Trouble was, he only opened a door that lead outside to the parking lot. In effect, he broke OUT of the building.

The next day, we found his screwdriver impaled in the wall where he had thrown or stabbed it and the broken remnants of a vase he must have smashed in his frustration. He left with nothing.

Oh, the valuables (what little there were) were in an unassuming closet with only a door knob lock in the hallway. No thief EVER thought to look in that closet as it did not have a deadbolt.

[Department stores *sigh*]

more like funniest theft.

working in Home E (as where most of my stories are it seems) and we hear a loud *SNAP!* I walk around the corner thinking and i dont see anything odd until a customer pointed out the cellphone end.......an entire peg off cellphones had been ripped from the wall! I turn around and run to the counter to see a guy rushing out with about $600.00 worth of cell phones on him. Unfortunatly we had no Loss Prevention on and we couldnt do anything about it. My co-worker was pissed we got ripped so badly and wondered why I was so calm. I reached under the counter and pulled out our log book. I did a count of the rest of the phones, found the serial numbers of the missing phones, and called the company and had each and every one of them reported as stolen making them impossibl to be activated.

Here hoping he sold em off to some friends who beat the crap outta him for selling them defective phones

[nick1091]

When I worked at a grocery store, someone got busted trying to steal about a dozen tubes of Preparation H. He certainly looked younger than your average hemmerhoid sufferer.

[BookstoreEscapee]

Had people steal Bibles of all things.

I've read that the Bible is the best selling book of all time, and also the most stolen. I've found plenty of wrappers from Bibles, but I don't know what was stolen and what was just unwrapped to look at and the wrapping just stuffed on the shelf. A lot of Bibles don't have ISBN #s or bar codes anywhere but the wrapper so it's hard to match them up.

-Used to find the dust jackets from the hardcover pocket-sized Kama Sutra just stuck wherever. Probably teenagers.
-Back when Playboy and the like were out in the newsstand, we used to find them in the men's room. Not quite the same as stolen but we wouldn't put them back out. They'd get stripped and we'd toss them. (Oddly, we also found them tucked into the religion section a lot.)
-Reading glasses...the cheapo $15 ones. The security tag is inside the plastic tag with the barcode that the glasses hang from. But that tag just slips right off and we find them all over the place. Also not stealing, but funny, sometimes you see people wearing the glasses with the tags still on them to look at books, then put them back.

[ahanix1989]

People stole our Parmesan shakers all the time. Maybe because they were made of glass and looked kinda nice... but still. Always the parmesan shakers, never the red pepper.

We eventually switched from the nice glass ones to plastic ones of the same style (Probably because I broke around 15 of them doing dishes -- fragile little things)

[HawaiianShirts]

Several of us actually stood around and watched a guy walk out with a pre-order box for some computer game. He was trying to be sneaky (and failing miserably), so we're pretty sure he was stealing it. But because it was a pre-order, we didn't care. He can't have the software when it releases without a receipt no matter how many boxes he might have.

Back when I worked at the pizza place, I watched somebody make a mad dash from the bathroom to the exit with three rolls of toilet paper in her arms. I figured if she needed it that badly, she could have it.

[RecoveringKinkoid]

A shrubbery.

[protege]

Some idiot stole one of the 'display model' power drills from Hechinger's once. Keep in mind that these things have the cords cut, the internals removed, but are weighted like a normal drill. Anyway, these things were tied to the counter with metal cables, which had alarms on them. Not far away, on the next aisle, was where we kept the bolt cutters. (Can you see where I'm going with this?)

Turns out the thief calmly went to the bolt cutter aisle, grabbed a pair, then walked over to the drill aisle, and cut the cable Now *that* took a serious set of brass ones to do that--the power tool aisle was visible from the central area, and the alarm went off.

I'm sure he had a serious case of CBF when he couldn't get the thing to work!

[ahanix1989]

A shrubbery.

I don't know why, but I like that one the best. Something about how you just outright said what it was, along with the mental picture of someone just walking out with a bush